by Jon Land
For the first time in longer than he could remember, Paz felt vulnerable, questioning his place here as well as the universe as a whole. He prayed in his mind for his priest to give him a sign from the great beyond, something that might assure him that his transformation had lost no ground.
Then he heard a rumble, the tunnel around him beginning to shake, as if an earthquake had taken hold of the area, helping him to do God’s work.
Thank you, Father, Paz almost said out loud.
He quickly realized that it wasn’t an act of God that had descended upon him, though. It was a speeding train, coming fast and hard.
109
TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER
Caitlin and Nola Delgado shrank back against the wall as the train’s lights blew a hole through the darkness in the tunnel beyond.
The construction of the tunnel was remarkable. All curving, tubular, and sleek, formed of once shiny steel that had dulled over the years and rusted in patches where groundwater had soaked through when the area above them flooded. It was a technological marvel built by men with an open-ended budget and a mandate based on a paranoid delusion. Jones had called it a hundred-billion-dollar boondoggle, which nonetheless left Caitlin picturing comparable warrens and track networks scattered all across the country. Unfinished and never joined up, much like the Cold War master plan to assure the maintenance of command and control in the event of a nuclear war.
“Showtime,” Nola said, pulling a backpack containing more of Doyle Lodge’s long-stored plastic explosives from her shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
Nola began wedging bricks of the plastique against the finished walls, which were topped with a gritty surface. “Making sure that train’s got no place to return to. Man, this shit goes back to prehistoric times…” Nola wedged a detonator-triggered blasting cap into the mound. “You couldn’t come up with something that doesn’t look like it came from a high school chemistry lab?”
“The Texas Rangers don’t include plastic explosives as part of our arsenal.”
“So long as the shit works,” Nola said, going back to work on a fresh mound.
* * *
Roland Fass was watching loaders ease into position more of the pallets crammed with the squarish steel storage containers when he heard Bone’s voice over his walkie-talkie.
“There’s something wrong.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. We need to rethink the plan.”
“As in…”
“I’m bringing this heap back.”
“The hell you are,” Fass said, in a tone he never would have used to Yarek Bone’s face.
“There’s something up ahead.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“Trouble, kempai,” Bone told him, above the racing sounds of the train chugging along at thirty miles per hour.
And that’s when Fass heard the blast that turned everything on Yarek Bone’s end to static-laced garble.
* * *
The ground rumbled beneath Cort Wesley and Doyle Lodge, and thin plumes of dust were kicked into the air.
The old lawman cupped a hand over his eyes and squinted into the desert beyond. “A couple miles that way, by my estimate.”
“Paz,” Cort Wesley figured. “Putting this underground railroad out of business for good.”
“You read me, Cort Wesley?” he heard Caitlin’s voice hail over the walkie-talkie.
He unclasped it from his belt and drew it close enough to feel the heat of the plastic and metal. “Loud and clear, Ranger.”
“Nola and I are approaching the facility now. Get ready to make things go boom.”
Cort Wesley watched Doyle Lodge pushing finger-size steel triggers into layered mounds of the plastic explosives at strategic intervals, drawing on his experience blowing bridges during the Korean War. “Just waiting for the word.”
“We got lights and men in our sights, Cort Wesley, lots of both.”
“This is going to be fun,” he heard Nola Delgado say in the background.
* * *
Paz watched the back of the train whipsaw from side to side, anchored by a rear engine facing back toward where it had originated. It looked like a giant snake, slithering quickly one way and then the other.
The explosives he’d set and triggered farther back had done their job, just as planned, tearing the track beds apart and leaving no rails for the train to gain purchase. But the plastique that should have blown beneath the front engine and the cars must have misfired, because all he saw was white smoke. The train wobbled as it ground past him, continuing to sway from side to side.
In that instant, the rear coiling cars tore free and toppled over, skirting forward on their sides and showering sparks as they rode fast down the tunnel. Paz’s men just managed to avoid them, as Paz himself ran alongside the surviving cars, with the onrushing spilled cars gaining ground on him.
The front half of the train started picking up speed again, almost past Paz, when he leaped out from the narrow platform and grabbed hold of a ladder on the last car.
* * *
“What happened?” Bone heard Roland Fass’s voice demand.
“We’re being attacked, that’s what happened, kempai. Lost half the train cars.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Who, goddammit? Who?”
Bone could feel the presence of an enemy, whoever was behind this, drawing closer. “Let you know when I find him. Over and out,” he finished, tossing the walkie-talkie aside as he moved for the engine compartment door.
110
TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER
Roland Fass watched Bone’s Fallen Timbers fighters fan out into position, guns poised and steadied toward the darkness in the curving train tunnel beyond.
Caitlin Strong …
He had no idea what made him form that thought. But who else could it be?
How did she track us here? How did she find this place?
It didn’t matter. Until that moment, his biggest concern had been how to explain to Lee Eckles the attack on the train bearing the first batch of the contaminated opioids. Now he realized that the entire facility was under attack and there was nothing Eckles could do to help him. He figured Caitlin Strong was in for a surprise when she came up against Yarek Bone’s gang of stone killers, figured he’d have at least some good news to report when she finally proved no match for the opposition.
Worst-case scenario, they still had more than half the deadly pills, and another half billion or so regular opiates, to distribute. Of course, those warehouses strategically located near major population centers across the country would have to be abandoned and replaced with others. A setback, for sure, but one they could survive if Bone’s men got the job done here.
And that’s when Fass heard the fresh blasts from closer down the tunnel. A cloud rolled out of the darkness, toward the light of the platform, as chunks of the ceiling dropped at his feet, dragging dark, rancid dirt behind them.
* * *
Cort Wesley felt the fresh rumble, closer this time, the ground seeming to lift up before settling down again. It was enough to make Doyle Lodge lurch backwards from setting the final detonators in place, as if searching for firmer ground.
“You sure know how to throw a party, son,” he said.
Cort Wesley’s GPS started beeping, and he yanked it from his pocket to find a flashing light already close and soon to be almost directly beneath their position.
Caitlin!
The maps Jones had provided of the underground railroad had proven to be spot-on, indeed, allowing him to breathe easier, given that he now was sure that when Doyle Lodge blew his ancient plastic explosives, the largest drug manufacturing facility the world had ever known would be put out of business for good. All he had to do was wait.
This was not something he was good at, though, especially when it came to Caitlin shooting it out with who knew how many gunmen below, whether Nola Delgado was wi
th her or not.
“You got this?” he asked Doyle Lodge.
The old lawman cupped a hand over his ear. “What was that, son?”
He flashed his walkie-talkie for Lodge to see. “Keep yours at the ready. I’ll call you when it’s time to hit the switch.”
Lodge lowered his hand and smiled. “Kill a couple for me, will ya?”
* * *
The ceiling was still collapsing when Caitlin pocketed her GPS signal indicator. She was in range of the platform, which was lined everywhere with shiny steel drums, a few of which had toppled on their sides and were rolling about. Workers moved to get them steady, while men she took for Fallen Timbers fighters fanned out with weapons steadied into the rolling cloud of dust and debris that camouflaged her and Nola Delgado’s approach forward.
“You know the biggest difference between us, sis?” Nola asked her suddenly.
“What?”
“When you gun men down, it’s legal.”
“What’s your point?”
“Maybe I should join the Texas Rangers.”
Then she charged down the platform ahead of Caitlin.
* * *
Paz clung to the side of the train. Thirty miles an hour doesn’t seem fast until you’re hanging on to ridged iron with your fingertips, he mused. Beyond that, the slats on this car must have bent in the blast, because the train wobbled as it rolled on, shaking up a storm and threatening to dislodge him.
Built decades ago to conform to the natural contours of the topography, the tunnel dipped and darted its way along, the wobbling seeming to worsen as Paz mounted the ladder. He was almost to the top when he glimpsed a pair of shapes literally fastened to the train’s top. He saw them just in time to duck back down beneath their twin streams of pistol fire.
They could only be a pair of Fallen Timbers killers lying in wait. He’d encountered more than his share of such paramilitary groups back in Venezuela, trusting neither those that professed to support the government nor those waging war against it.
Paz settled on a strategy to use the superior position of the Fallen Timbers fighters against them, easing the shaved-down M4 assault rifle around from behind his shoulder and flak jacket. He then remounted the ladder as high as he dared, steadying the barrel up and well forward, pointing ahead toward the tunnel ceiling, which was little more than concrete layered over cut-out rock. Adjusting his aim further as instinct directed, Paz let loose with a spray the gunmen must have figured was wildly off target.
Until the train rolled under that section of ceiling, a moment after it began to collapse in a thick shower of rock, concrete, and other debris. Paz heard grunts, groans, and what might have been a scream, though the roaring of the big diesel engine made it difficult to tell.
By the time he mounted the roof, the train had shed most of the debris that had crushed the gunmen, who’d chained themselves in place. They were either badly wounded or dead, and either way they weren’t about to offer any further resistance to him, Paz thought, as he crouched and then stood all the way up on the train’s roof.
Just as the massive figure of a man who could only be Yarek Bone climbed atop the first of the three remaining cars.
* * *
Cort Wesley found the camouflaged entrance to the underground drug plant exactly where his GPS locator indicated it should have been, according to Jones’s map. He twisted open the hatch and yanked it open.
A set of steep steel steps with matching railings dropped down a good hundred feet, accessing the facility beyond.
Thank you, Jones, he thought. The man formerly with Homeland Security was seemingly much more helpful to the cause now that he wasn’t part of Washington anymore.
Almost to the bottom of the stairs, Cort Wesley heard a rumble he first took to be a fresh explosion, until he spotted a flood of several dozen workers charging in panicked fashion toward the stairs he was descending. Some had fled so fast that they had yet to shed outfits that resembled something between a hazmat and a space suit, respirators dangling from their necks as if they’d forgotten to discard them as well.
The rush surged past Cort Wesley, paying him no heed at all. The direction from which they had come was the direction in which he had to go.
“Cort Wesley!” he heard Caitlin’s voice crackle from his walkie-talkie.
“I’m down in your neighborhood now, Ranger, and on my way.”
“A good thing,” she told him, “because I’m trapped.”
111
TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER
Caitlin had caught up with Nola and found her pinned behind a pillar, bleeding from the face. Loose flecks of concrete from ricocheting bullets had pricked her like a dozen pins.
“You need to learn patience, Nola,” she advised, taking cover behind a separate pillar as more gunfire rocketed their way.
“Never my strong suit, sis.”
Nola peeked out from the pillar, steadied her aim with the M4 assault rifle, and fired in the same motion. Her spray was instantly returned by what felt like a dozen bullet streams, chasing Caitlin back behind a curve in the tunnel. The pillar she’d been poised behind looked like somebody had taken a jackhammer to it.
Bone’s Fallen Timbers gunmen must have figured they had nailed her, because they now concentrated the whole of their fire on Nola Delgado. That freed Caitlin to spin outward, firing her M4 on full auto in the open. She lacked real shooting experience with the weapon, aware as all gunmen were that cardboard made a bad substitute for blood and bone. From this distance, the best she could hope for was to keep the Fallen Timbers fighters at bay, to serve as a distraction and free up a fire lane for Nola.
Nola seized the opportunity, spinning out from the pillar she’d been using as cover, with a fresh magazine jammed home. Ahead on the platform, Caitlin glimpsed shapes being chewed up by the fire as Nola charged forward to shrink the distance between her and her targets. Others retreated for cover behind an impenetrable wall of what looked like steel storage drums, probably containing the latest shipment of drugs—or, to Jones’s point about something weaponized, maybe something even worse.
Caitlin surged forward in Nola’s wake, enemy fire spewing bursts of concrete and floor tile, the sting of impact against her skin and clothes feeling like pinpricks poking home. She took cover behind another pillar, immediately behind the half sister her father had never known existed.
Nola was breathing hard, clearly far more rattled than she was accustomed to. “How many strips of plastic you got left, sis?”
“Two bricks,” Caitlin told her, picturing them inside separate pockets of the cargo vest she wore over her flak jacket. “A trigger for each.”
“Give me one—no, both.”
Caitlin tossed the twin mounds across the platform and Nola snatched them out of the air, molding the claylike compound into a shape slightly bigger than a softball and perfectly round.
“How old you say this stuff was?” Nola asked her.
“I didn’t.”
Nola finished balling the plastic explosive up. “Fire in the hole, sis,” she said to Caitlin, wedging a finger-size detonator into the center.
Then she hurled the softball-size mound into the air the way she would a grenade. It soared as if catching some kind of underground wind. It landed close to the enemy gunmen firing upon them, and then Nola hit the detonator.
The explosion pushed a flood of air through Caitlin’s ears, the vibration deafening her as much as the sound, bringing with it the original scorching pain she’d felt months before, after triggering the blast that had almost blown her eardrums to smithereens. That pain had made her a hostage to the same kind of pills that had almost killed Luke and that had taken nearly eighty thousand lives last year.
She needed a pill—make that a whole bottleful—if she’d been able to spare the time needed to reach into another pocket for the Vicodin she’d brought along for the ride.
A rumbling she could feel at the pit of her stomach came next, as the airburst ruptured the
walls at the far end of the train tunnel. Concrete and the rock formations layered behind it crashed inward in a massive pile that climbed all the way to the ceiling.
When the dust cloud thinned, most of the rectangular steel drums behind which the Fallen Timbers fighters had taken cover had toppled over, a few continuing to teeter upon their perch. The blast had torn holes in plenty of them and turned still more into twisted metal good for nothing but scrap. White, oblong pills were scattered everywhere, covering the platform and tracks with what might have been snow.
“Oops,” Nola said, spotting the mound of concrete that had collapsed onto the platform, cutting off that way forward.
* * *
Paz drained the rest of his magazine toward Bone’s position, the man’s massive shape dropping down between the first car and the engine as if anticipating the action perfectly. He was sure to be timing his next move, keeping in mind the precious seconds it would take to reload.
So Paz didn’t reload. He tossed the submachine gun aside and ran, leaping from one train car to the next and reaching the head of the front car at the very moment when Bone remounted it, pistol in hand. His presence seemed to confuse the Comanche, taking him by surprise, enough for Paz to knock the pistol from Bone’s grasp.
He was still ready when Bone lashed out with a knife that looked as big as a sword. Its dulled finish was testament to its age; it likely had been passed down from previous generations of Bone’s family and thus was a weapon that had killed before. Bone worked it like an extension of his arm, side to side, jabbing and thrusting forward to keep Paz backpedaling and retreating until he had no more space to go.
